Today’s interview is with a very special friend of the Where Sidewalks End community. It is my honour to introduce to you Mr Tom Vater. Tom is a published author, a long time journalist in the field, co-owner of a publishing house “Crime Wave Press”, and a long time explorer of the world, with a heavy focus on South East Asia. He has done everything from magazine and newspaper features, documentary screenplays, illustrated books, travel guides, travelogues and novels, and travel has always had strong roots throughout. You can find a lot of interesting facts about and tid bits of Tom’s escapades by reading any number of his articles found within this realm, or through any of his published work around the internet and in many large book stores, including the large online corporation Amazon. For a more personal view into what drives Mr Vater, we thought this would be a good opportunity to get behind the scenes. Today we’ll find out a little bit about what has motivated him to continue exploring the uncharted off the beaten track world.

Back in March, I guided a group of visitors to Thailand to the annual Wai Khru (Respect your teacher) at Wat Bang Phra temple, an hour west of Bangkok, the largest event celebrating all things sak yant, Thailand’s spirit tattoos, in the country.

Great group, wonderful day.

Thanks to Where Sidewalks End and Ian Ord.

It’s always great to reconnect with the incredibly fascinating world of Thailand’s spirit tattoos. For more info, check out my best-selling book, co-authored with photographer Aroon Thaewchatturat and published by Visionary World, Sacred Skin, now in its second edition.

From a punk rock collective in Borneo to European proto-colonies and ethnic minorities in India, rock stars and a circus from Cambodia, the scourge of development in Laos, female motorcycle taxi drivers in Thailand, Japanese entrepreneurs in France and my eye witness reports of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the Asian Nikkei Review has published some of my best writing of the last three years, much of it co-authored with and generally improved by the incredibly erudite Laure Siegel.

The market for good print stories is getting smaller all the time. Especially for off the wall, niche or sub-cultural stuff. So it’s great to see some of my recent work published specially to be read on smart phones. Almost everyone has one and there’s more to life than Candy Crush.

ATC Tattoo Books have published quite a few of the tattoo stories I wrote with Laure Siegel in the past years, especially our fantastic work on India (as well stories from Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Burma) which was originally published in French with Rise Tattoo Magazine.

ATC Tattoo Books also just republished my interview with Chris Roi – The Death Row Tattooist – a story on ink and survival in one of America’s supermax prisons. More on Chris here.

Sitting on the banks of the Song River, the rural town might seem serene now. But Vang Vieng has seen a tumultuous 15 years, evolving from an agricultural community to a hedonistic party capital when it was “discovered” by Western shoestring travelers in the late 1990s.

Excessive drinking, drugs, trash, concrete construction and fatal accidents were detrimental to the local community.

But in 2012, Vang Vieng’s narrative changed completely when the government shuttered most of the problematic bars and activities and repositioned the town as an eco-paradise.

Since then, a refreshed Vang Vieng has risen from the ashes of its erstwhile excesses.

The town has reinvented itself as the country’s hub of adventure travel, offering a lengthy menu of adrenaline-fueled experiences.

The full collection also includes recordings from India, Laos and Cambodia. It will be digitally preserved as part of the Unlocking our Sound Heritage project.

The Moken – seafarers of the Andaman Sea

Ko Surin is a group of five small islands in the Andaman Sea, sixty kilometres off the Thai coast. They are entirely covered in primary rain forests, with two small villages inhabited by Moken communities of roughly 160 people. The Moken used to live almost entirely on their boats as they travelled in the seas between Thailand and Myanmar. These days they have been forced to settle on the islands where they have built small huts standing in rows on stilts in the surf.

Tom Vater (sound recordist and writer) and Aroon Thaewchatturat (photographer), during their research stay on Ko Surin Nua in 1999, became part of a campfire singsong. The songs, lead by Tawan and Ko Yang (two women singers) accompanying themselves on a single plastic barrel, told of their daily experiences and of their relationships with one another. This song, lu iu ma iu (brother and brother) is a good example.

So now that the media is gushing over the fact that there are human beings living in North Korea, does this mean that the reclusive terror state we can hardly point to on a map will soon be another impoverished capitalist nation selling kimchi flavored coca cola toxins to its liberated citizens, producing nothing but plastic, pornography, tourists and (better) weapons behind a facade of civilized speech and farcical commitment to equality for all, while keeping its tiny elite in the money?
And are there any beaches or camps that could be turned into controlled environments for the soon to be visiting fat sack degenerate tourist masses from around the world?
Is the second to last evil nation on earth about to go rogue on itself and join the rest of us in our common, more or less democratically agreed efforts to put up mirrors for the blind (called taking selfies these days), destroy the planet and deny ourselves a future?
And who will we be told to love to hate then (the last evil nation on earth, I am guessing)?
And if the Koreas reunite, will Brexit still go ahead?
Heady news from Asia. It’s all going to be great.
Peace is coming. Dylan was right. Trump is Jesus. Kim is a whore, but he will be one of ours.
Before long they will be suing each other to have an allegedly unbiased court of law determine who is the more peace loving of the two. All of us will be online jurors. We will be able to vote, finally in a meaningful way, on who’s the total loser and who gets the stripper. Haircuts will play a big part in our grounded, rational decision making.
The media will lap it up, cough up experts who were wrong for thirty years but just got a pay rise because the ground beneath their feet has changed. Things will fall in line and those who don’t will be ridiculed and exterminated in the name of a better future. Social media, newspapers and TV channels will mold the narrative, create some background, attract subscriptions, make a fortune and open a bureau or two in Pyonyang. Zuckerberg will be the first man on earth to hold two passports from the two most peaceful nations on earth. Abba will reform. Richard Branson will circumnavigate the peninsula in a balloon accompanied by scantily clad virgins, dropping tons of trademarked fake ready to eat meat products made from north Korean children and south Korean circuit boards onto the masses gathering below, killing the unlucky ones while the rest roar with joyous relief. Angelina Jolie will be excited and fight harder for peace, women, skin products and corporations. Mel Gibson will go all method for the movie, do a six month crash course in how to tweet, followed by a most nuanced turn as a misogynist racist. He will die his hair. He’ll be better than Jesus. The past will be forgotten. It always is, before it even hits the floor, stone cold. Gary Oldman will play Kim, and the make-up will be out of this world. Charlton Heston will be digitally recreated. Kevin Spacey will get a cameo. Polanski and Chris Nolan will co-direct. The Stones will do the soundtrack. Tarantino will sue. Someone’s tits will fall out of a shirt when they collect the Oscars. Me too, everyone will shout. And don’t worry. I will get my hands dirty. None of that holding back, none of that ‘I am too lofty and clever for you lot’. I’ll be right there along with you, down the front, digging in and doubling down, waving the flags, clubbing the doubters, dopamined out of my skull, feeding on mass delusions of orchestrated grandeur. Hell, maybe I will finally become a celebrity, do a Ted Talk on genocide and go on World’s Got Talent.
Win Win for all.
Fake news will be a thing of the past. Propaganda will cease. No more stuffed ant eaters posing for prizes or black panthers jumping into soup pots. Coral reefs will come back to life. Plastic and ignorance will dissolve like cheese that’s fallen between the metal bars of the grill. Women will be respected. Minorities will be listened to. A new dawn is coming.
Then we will up the ante, embrace fundamental truths and historic righteousness and invest the personal valor of the young and stupid to go the whole, last painful hog and bring freedom to Teheran. Whatever it will take, the experts will say, poisoning our brainwashed minds. And then the world will be silent and perfect.
Today is a great day. Outside my window the sun is shining and the birds, those that have not been gassed or eaten, are chirping. Better than yesterday but not as good as tomorrow.
Now tell me, is any of this any less likely to happen than what you read when you opened your eyes this morning and logged on?
Anastasia screamed in vain. She really did.

Great review at Literary Flits of my second Detective Maier thriller, The Man with the Golden Mind, from a while back. Somehow this one escaped me altogether.

I am again impressed with a Crime Wave Press offering, this one being a Cold War aftermath spy thriller set in a country about which I knew very little: Laos. Tom Vater sets up an intricate and complicated plot which I found it a joy to get lost in and also introduces interesting and believable characters, both male and female. The women in this novel aren’t just eye candy!